Chapter 9 draws on a project looking at the world of the collector and collection curator (Our World), and the role of narrative (The Third Police- man) serving two unrelated purposes. Firstly, Our World is an analogy for 'our world' - one of identifying and staying within particular domains, a condition of our propensity to place a boundary around what we regard as being 'in' to the exclusion of everything else. Our World is a metaphor, then, for the working environment of the curator, and considers their custodianship on behalf of the interests of others, looking after collections ranging from objects to concepts. In terms of scripting narrative space: is such space constrained by the logic of program code?
The essential dilemma addressed here is whether creative scripting can only be the work of one person within the team. This was a question posed to senior architectural students (at Australia's Deakin University in the mid-1990s) - I wanted to investigate the implications of design scripters working together to create one program. This chapter begins with an account of the generation of Our World, exploring the challenges that an apparently simple task can generate due to unexpected complexity emerging along the way, and the unintended riches that can still result as a consequence. While the contents of Our World may be computationally inevitable, they may not be capable of being humanly envisaged: the precision of the machine's cold logic might be enlivened by the excite- ment induced by surprise.
The sample code here was used to produce all of the models in this chapter using a common scripting language within a readily available modelling software.
Credits: Mark Burry, James Wojtek, Andrew Miller, Michael Wilson, James Loder and Grant Dunlop